The invention relates to an improvement of a drive section of a damper that controls the operation of opening and closing a cold air inlet by a baffle within a refrigerator.
As shown in Japanese Utility Model Unexamined Publication No. Sho. 63-57877, a conventional damper is designed to open and close a baffle in the following way. The rotational force of a motor is reduced by a reduction gear train, and such reduced force is transmitted to a projecting end-face cam that is formed on one side surface of a gear of the reduction gear train. Under such conditions, the baffle is opened and closed by a spindle that moves vertically relative to the end face of a gear formed on the end-face cam, the spindle which is in slidable contact with the end-face cam. The opening and closing operation of the baffle is performed in the form of a turning movement about the pivot of the baffle; more specifically, the opening operation is performed by the spindle driven by the end-face cam, and the closing operation is performed by turning the baffle with the biasing force of a plate spring applied in the closing direction.
The conventional damper results in the following problems.
(1) The opening and closing dimensions (that is, the opening and closing stroke) of the baffle are restricted by a shape of the cam. PA0 (2) A force for closing the baffle consists of only the elastic force which is caused by the plate spring, therefore the baffle is liable to stop when the baffle is frozen. PA0 (3) The amount of projection of the cam is increased-when the opening stroke is set to a large value. This means that the cam must be thick in the axial direction and thereby increases the entire structure of the damper.